Writers of all stripes - be they poets, playwrights, songwriters, writers of Hallmark greeting cards, writers of Hallmark movies, novelists, memoirists and more - have written about love. They have written about being in love, about what it is like to fall in love and sometimes what it is like to fall out of love and into other less valentine emotions.

Love, however, is an experience. There is a bodily knowing that occurs that is outside of language, that is outside of what can be captured on the page.

Writing about the Alexander Technique feels similar to me. The Alexander Technique (AT) is experienced in the moment. AT is learned, or perhaps remembered, from the body. Saki Santorelli used the phrase “same wine in different bottles” to describe all the different doors to the room where the true self lives. If you are practicing any discipline that explores your self, AT is not going to feel completely foreign to you.

Now, having stated that writing about AT is not the same as experiencing it, I’d like to start a series breaking down AT a bit over these next few weeks to highlight what the system entails when I refer to AT as Systematic Body-Awareness.

To go all the way back and give a very birds eye view: Frederik Matthais Alexander (1869-1955) was a real live person who made a living as a performer. He developed an issue with his voice, affecting his livelihood. Doctors would put him on vocal rest. He’d dutifully rest and return to the stage and promptly lose his voice again. Frustrated, he took matters into his own hands. Becoming his own subject of study, he set up mirrors to observe his body in action and he experimented. What he found was that his use of his own instrument was causing the vocal distress - his habits and conditioning were at cross purposes to his career. So, he systematically went about the work of experimenting with how to undo years of these habits and in so doing created his new technique.

Others noticed the change and wanted to learn how he did it. The story goes he first taught it to his brother - finding language both spoken and physical to convey the necessary steps to free oneself from the conditioning that can hold us back.

He ended up in London and taught there for many years. Perhaps his most famous pupil at the time was Aldous Huxley, but his work grew and grew as he trained other teachers. The Alexander Technique is still finding itself in spaces where the curious are hoping to explore getting out from under what can amount to years and years of conditioning that if it was ever helpful, has long since worn out its welcome.

One of Alexander’s first students, Patrick Macdonald, helpfully pointed to what sets Alexander apart from other courses of study - delineating the terroir, to extend the wine metaphor, of AT.

Namely:

Recognition of the Force of Habit
Inhibition and Non-Doing
Recognition of Faulty Sensory Awareness
Sending Directions
The Primary Control

A bulleted list perhaps offers the illusion of a linear path. Not so fast! One might start anywhere in this list, but practicing AT will offer the embodiment of all five within the list - much like the ribs move one at a time and all together - these tentpoles of AT apply themselves one at a time and all together.

An example that you can try right here right now might involve freeing up the back of your neck. “Let the neck be free” might be said to be the first commandment of AT. The five tentpoles might show up in various ways in response to this experiment:

Recognition of the Force of Habit
- You may notice that the back of the neck is tight, this might be a habit - and “sending a direction” to the back of the neck to let go of the crown of the head may counter the habit.
Inhibition and Non-Doing
- After recognizing if there is a habit of pulling down with the back of the neck there maybe a vague idea that instead of pulling down, we should push up - which, over time, might become a new habit that is still not going to alleviate tension. So inhibiting any “fixing” we just allow things to be as they are
Recognition of Faulty Sensory Awareness
- Tricky, but an example might be if your habit includes a tense back of the neck and all the sudden that tension is gone - you might feel like a massive over correction has occurred - your nose is pointed just above the horizon when the neck is tense, but it “feels like” it is pointed at your feet without that tension - using a mirror you might see that your nose is pointed at the horizon and what Alexander called “Debauched Kinesthia” is at play. It’s a practice of seeing again what is actually true, and repetition perfects grace
Sending Directions
- As mentioned, “Let the neck be free” is a direction. A thought bubble sent to a body part - that might be followed by other directions. This word “direction” might be reframed as “invitation” and the language used will develop both internally (as when Alexander taught himself to free up) and externally (when he taught his brother) for each individual
The Primary Control
- Primary Control is, frankly, a terrible name for the ability of the spine to lengthen and gather in response to the breath. Primary Control is naming our primordial movement pattern. That felt sense of expanding and contracting with the breath is a tool that can be developed to keep us “in” the technique

Over the next number of weeks I’ll be unpacking these five items and if you have questions or want to reach and discuss - get in touch through www.balancelab.com.

Be well!